Sparkle 8800GTS 512MB Review: G92 Madness Continues

The G92 based Geforce 8800GT was a very exciting product, unfortunately NVIDIA was short of supply and lower priced ATI HD3850 & HD3870 gained a lot of popularity this way. The higher-end market still remained untouched; to fill up this gap NVIDIA came up with a second wave of 8800GTS video cards. With the GT in mind, could we be dealing with yet another great NVIDIA product? We find out.

Introduction

Introduction

2007 began with the introduction of the NVIDIA 8800GTS 320MB, one of best products of the year, offering nearly high-end performance at half the price! 2007 also brought us many high quality first person shooters, the gaming industry has had a fantastic year, and with the never ending improvements in graphics quality we could say that the video card industry also had their piece of the pie. The demand for more video memory space and faster rendering performance increased, as a results NVIDIA came up with the 8800 GT, a true killer for any mainstream video card at the time being and unfortunately haunted by a short in supply. This card has had a very hard time finding its way to the customers. Those who have few euros more to spend had nothing to look forward to, as the 8800 Ultra remains NVIDIA’s fastest card.

NVIDIA again took their G92 GPU and came up with something new, the 8800 GTS 512MB is born. Compared to the mainstream 8800 GT, this new product got 16 extra parallel rendering engines, combined with increased clock speeds you could expect a very powerful video card, much alike the 8800 Ultra, but then at nearly half of its price. That's just assuming though, Dollarshops.eu has equipped us with a reviewing sample, let's not wait any longer, here is Sparkle's version of the new 8800 GTS 512MB:

Based on the NVIDIA G92 GPU, the Sparkle 8800GTS 512MB comes with 128 stream processors clocked at 1625MHz, while the GPU core is clocked at 650MHz. This means 32 extra shader processors, 30% higher GPU clock, and 35% higher shader clock compared to the original GTS. The memory also benefits from boosted clock speed, at 1940MHz the DDR3 modules are clocked nearly 22% higher, the downside is that they are accessed via a 256-bit wide bus where the original GTS had a 320-bit wide bus. With 512MB available memory space, the new GTS is in between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the elder GTS, not exactly close to the GTX but certainly sufficient in today's games.

Before we dive into the performance charts let me first introduce you with the contents of the box ->